Entertainment interspersed with propaganda: how non-legacy-news accounts deliver explicitly political content to mass audiences on Russia’s most popular social network VK

Previous research on political communication on Russia's most popular social network VK has concluded that most users avoid news by not following legacy-news accounts. In this study, we expand the universe of scrutinized accounts with the most-followed non-legacy-news accounts (>100,000 followers) that regularly publish what we theorize to be ‘explicitly political content’ (EPC; N = 355). We delineate a typology of six types of EPC accounts, calculate their aggregate follower counts, and determine how many of them were still (1) accessible from Russia and (2) publishing Kremlin-critical content in October 2022. Our findings indicate that non-critical accounts attracted 26 times more followers than Kremlin-critical accounts. Entertainment-focused EPC accounts had seven times more followers than legacy-news accounts. As a result, they became the primary means through which non-critical EPC reached news-avoidant mass audiences. We identify three dimensions through which autocrats can interweave propaganda and entertainment and highlight promising research paths.